Monday, July 31, 2006

500 year old liberal intellectual traditions of moral and ethical debate have been tossed into the gutter

We have lost elementary moral distinctions over the last century. As a culture, we pretend we cannot tell the difference between accidental shootings by police in pursuit of killers, and deliberate killing by those intent on destroying innocents. This is not, as the Left likes to boast, a reflection of our higher morality. It is a loss of elementary moral discrimination. We are much less moral than our ancestors of a hundred or two hundred years ago.

One role of the New Media must be to restore that common sense morality which says that hiding behind women and children in war is murder, plain and simple. The onus for murder is on the terrorist, not the cop.

There is a solution: It is for the media and the United Nations to rediscover the elementary moral distinctions of the original Geneva Conventions. Killing innocents is murder. Drawing enemy fire on children is evil. It’s not hard.

And Right Wing Nut House's conclusion,

...the traditions in the west of wrestling with moral questions regarding war has been deliberately abandoned. Any new moral truths or clarity that would emerge from such a debate or discussion would threaten the left’s ability to use civilian deaths exactly as Hizbullah does; to beat their political opponents over the head.

It’s a shame, really. The very people who would ordinarily be at the center of helping the west in creating any new moral paradigms for fighting and winning the War on Terror are letting her down in her hour of greatest need. The 500 year old liberal intellectual traditions of moral and ethical debate have been tossed into the gutter and replaced with an unyielding, anti-intellectual absolutism that will brook no opposition to its cherished tenets and comfortable, old shoe verities.

We may yet pay dearly for their prideful ignorance before all is said and done.